Apple® today announced a €1.7 billion plan to build and operate two data centres in Europe, each powered by 100 percent renewable energy. The facilities, located in County Galway, Ireland (see artist impression below) and Denmark’s central Jutland, will power Apple’s online services including the iTunes Store®, App Store℠, iMessage®, Maps and Siri® for customers across Europe.

The two data centres, each measuring 166,000 square metres, are expected to begin operations in 2017 and include designs with additional benefits for their communities. For the project in Athenry, Ireland, Apple will recover land previously used for growing and harvesting non-native trees and restore native trees to Derrydonnell Forest. The project will also provide an outdoor education space for local schools, as well as a walking trail for the community. In Viborg, Denmark, Apple will eliminate the need for additional generators by locating the data centre adjacent to one of Denmark’s largest electrical substations. The facility is also designed to capture excess heat from equipment inside the facility and conduct it into the district heating system to help warm homes in the neighboring community.

The Altoona (Iowa) facility is the first in Facebook’s fleet to feature a building-wide network fabric – an entirely new way to do intra-data center networking the company’s infrastructure engineers have devised.

The social network is moving away from the approach of arranging servers into multiple massive compute clusters within a building and interconnecting them with each other. Altoona has a single network fabric whose scalability is limited only by the building’s physical size and power capacity.

As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle into some of the very spaces where brick-and-mortar customers used to shop. The shift brings welcome tenants to some abandoned stretches of the suburban landscape, though it doesn’t replace all the jobs and sales-tax revenue that local communities lost when stores left the building.

Venyu Solutions LLC, a data-center operator that is renovating the former department store in Jackson, sees more opportunity for conversion because of sheer amount of distressed retail properties. “Who else wants them?” said Brian Vandegrift, the company’s executive vice president of sales. “You’re not competing with people in substantial businesses who want those spaces.”

Google has spent more than $1 billion to buy and renovate a former paper mill in Finland that can store its user data. Nestled in the caves of a Norwegian mountain, a regional IT company uses a facility built by a local investment group and cooled by a fjord. Microsoft says it will spend $250 million to construct a data center in Finland to manage its cloud services, as part of its agreement to acquire Nokia’s device business. In Luleå, a city of 50,000 on the banks of the Lule less than 70 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Facebook fired up a 300,000-square-foot data center last year.

Google, an early convert to Puppet, uses its products to rapidly update the software running servers and employee PCs. So does music-streaming service Spotify. On servers or PCs, “it would have been impossible to grow and manage the Spotify infrastructure without a configuration management tool like Puppet,” says company engineer Johan Haals. GE Capital uses Chef to manage its servers and network switches, and chief engineer Justin Arbuckle says he can use it to distribute a new app across a network in a couple of hours. “In the past, it would have literally taken weeks and weeks,” he says.

"We have brought the storage into the cluster, and we have
commoditized it," says Ting, and this is why the US government,
financial services firms, healthcare companies, and educational
institutions are running a lot of proofs of concepts with the NX-3000
series of appliances.

About 25 per cent of the iron is going to Uncle Sam, which is in many
cases putting server clusters into vehicles to get image and signal
processing at command posts or into the field in Humvees, in some cases.

Virtual desktop infrastructure was the obvious early-use case for
Nutanix machines, and it is still driving a lot of deals, but Ting says
the company is seeing companies dump Microsoft workloads such as
Exchange Server and SQL Server on the boxes, and has just closed a deal
this month with a Global 2000-class company for 1,500 server nodes to
run an analytics workload."

Nice summary of the innovations Microsoft has implemented in data center design, energy and water sources and efficiencies over the last decade. I cataloged Microsoft’s data center efficiencies in The New Polymath, and Facebook’s and Google’s in The New Technology Elite, and it may be time to revisit Microsoft for my next book especially specific to energy innovations from the blog:

Biomass generation project in Europe that would operate on waste fuel

Large photovoltaic solar project in the Southwestern U.S.

Fuel cell installation that would improve reliability and eliminate the need for back-up diesel generators in situations where the power grid goes down

Combined heat and power (CHP) projects that capture waste heat for reuse